The excerpt “Chatty As A Magpie,” by Hannah Holmes, discusses the similarities between human communication and the communication of our animal brethren. Holmes firmly believes that animals are much more intelligent than we give them credit for, and that their communication bears a remarkable resemblance to ours. It uses different types of evidence to demonstrate this, including personal experiences, examples from nature, expert opinions, and statistics based on a scientific study. His evidence is presented in an unusual form, but depending on your point of view that could be a good thing or a bad thing. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Holmes' use of personal experience is one of the most controversial of his uses of evidence. The first personal experience she used is a story about how she was able to "talk" to her mother and send signals about what she wanted in the womb. “The only means available to me at that time was chemistry. So, in protein ink, I scribbled letters to my mother: More nourishment, please” (Holmes, 2). While Holmes obviously doesn't remember what he was doing in the womb, I don't doubt that his information is based on real scientific data. Although putting his information in the form of a personal anecdote makes the information more interesting and makes it more easily understandable by a younger audience, yet when it comes to a person who cares about real data and information, the story seems trivial and less credible. Holmes later has another story from his childhood, however this one was set when he was one year old and used visual communication, such as body language and facial features to convey his message. “There I was, at one year old, throwing the protolanguage around like it was nobody's business. Throwing around my facial features and my hands” (Holmes, 7). Although this has a similar problem to her previous personal testimony, this seems more credible because instead of simply taking a fact of a child's development and pretending it was hers, this could be witnessed by someone such as a parent or an older sibling and could le were told, thus gaining more credibility as real personal experience. Along with her personal evidence she offers an example from nature that correlates to her story from the womb. “This type of 'chemical communication' has been pioneered by single-celled organisms […] The eyeless and earless Amoeba proteus, for example, emits a peptide that prevents its fellow proteans from cannibalizing it” (Holmes, 2). This evidence seems much more reliable than personal evidence for two main reasons. The first is that he presents a more honest-sounding statement since he is not trying to fool us into thinking it is his story, and many of the things he says seem too obscure to be casually made up statements about the single-celled organism. creature in nature. While this helps his case, there is still no clear citation in an article stating these facts, so you have to believe it on its own merit alone. Expert opinion is one of the most reliable forms of evidence, and this is where Holmes gets some of the credibility he has lost due to his personal anecdotes. In this section he talks about how prairie dogs have very complex vocal communication, similar to how humans speak. “the prairie dog shouts specific words for specific predators […] it is even thought that prairie dogs encode information about the direction in which an animal is approaching […] when biologist Con Slobodchikoff recently